Python 'for' loop is memory inefficient

[bartc]

"Steven D'Aprano" <steve at REMOVE-THIS-cybersource.com.au> wrote in message 
news:02969972$0$20647$c3e8da3 at news.astraweb.com...
> On Fri, 14 Aug 2009 18:25:45 -0700, Dr. Phillip M. Feldman wrote:
>
>> It seems as though Python is actually expanding range(2,n) into a list
>> of numbers, even though this is incredibly wasteful of memory. There
>> should be a looping mechanism that generates the index variable values
>> incrementally as they are needed.
>
>
> Others have already pointed out to you that xrange() (for Python 2.x)
> does what you want. In Python 3.x, the old range() is gone for good, and
> xrange() renamed to just range().

It does seem rather worrying that whoever originally thought up Python 
decided it would be a good idea to implement a simple 1 to N (or 0 to N-1) 
for-loop by first creating an array of N consecutive integers!

They must have known Python was going to be slow anyway, but this wouldn't 
have helped the speed any. Nor the memory consumption.

A for-loop, for iterating over a simple sequence, should be one of the 
fastest things in the language.

[Presumably the internal code that created those consecutive integers used a 
more conventional looping method...]

-- 
Bartc